HP reluctant to push Windows 8 for enterprise Ultrabooks

Major PC vendor HP was showing off some snazzy Ultrabooks at the exhibition area of the Intel Development Forum. One, a high spec machine, that will come out in October and cost approximately $1,200 comes kitted out with Windows 7 and has both backward and forwards compatibility.

A source close to HP said the company had no plans as yet to sell Ultrabooks into the enterprise space and that there were very good reasons for that decision.

She said that there is still a considerable number of enterprise customers that haven’t yet moved from Windows XP to Windows 7, and moving direct from Widows (sic) XP to Windows 8 doesn’t really make commercial sense.

In addition, enterprise customers have concerns about “Metro”, the touch screen enabled component of Windows 8 that can’t be avoided at boot up. Touch facilities add an extra $100 or so to the cost of a client notebook and businesses are not necessarily in any rush to have their workers using touch on their machines. Touch is a swipe too far.

While geeks think swiping is de rigeur, there is still plenty of debate about implementing BYOD (bring your own device) into a corporate environment. The more outrageous promises of Haswell also don’t appeal to business buyers and IT departments. Using gestures in the office might well be misinterpreted, and talking to your machine might identify you as a crazy.

Basically, the source added, cost is king and added features don’t necessarily appeal at all. An analyst at IDF added that in his opinion Intel should buy a battery company and throw its efforts into improving battery life.